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Julie188 writes "Sam Ramji thinks the days where Microsoft's, (and Apple's, and Oracle's) love-hate relationship with open source are numbered, thanks to the cloud. Whereas some open source advocates say the cloud may kill open source, because users won't have access to the source, Ramji says the cloud will be its salvation. Ramji, Microsoft's original internal open source dude, thinks companies building clouds won't be able to keep up if they don't participate in open source communities because that's where the developers building new cloud infrastructure are doing most of their work. The main concerns standing in the way for both cloud builders and users of free software are legal fears, he contends. These include fears of the GPL's copyleft provision and fears of being sued by downstream users. Is he right ... or full of FUD?"

On the whole I agree with Ramji here though. I think that the development of cloud computing in many areas (though not applicable everywhere of course) will force many companies who are sitting on the fence to adopt open source both for reasons of up front cost, and also for reasons of participation in the community. This trend will furthermore move up the stack until all that is held as proprietary (even in BSD-licensed projects) will be a few enhancements tailored to the

Well, here's how things work with the (BSD-licensed) PostgreSQL community:

Lots of people develop and share code. Some companies release proprietary, closed source versions. For example, EnterpriseDB offers Oracle compatibility above what the community wants, and therefore finds a niche market in those who are migrating from Oracle. Green Plum offers a parallel-based BI version. However on the whole these companies contribute back everything the community would actually accept or want in order to minimiz

To be honest, I don't like the whole idea of SaaS at all, which is what this "cloud" computing is. In the end all it does is take control away from the user, regardless of the software being open or not. I can see it being used for a business so that employees can take their work home with them, but once you start trusting others with your data, you're going down a dangerous path.

The danger is there not just regarding open source though. Think of the dangers it poses for data ownership for businesses. I am a firm believer that businesses should not store their data in a cloud, unless it is one they have direct back-end access to (like a virtual private server or something), and even then they should be taking frequent backups and bringing those off the cloud.

The fact is, critical data needs to be owned by the company that is using it, and it needs to reside (at least in backup fo

The fact is, critical data needs to be owned by the company that is using it, and it needs to reside (at least in backup form, if not in fully managed form) inside the company's infrastructure.

Absolutely. I can't tell you how many small businesses I've worked with that are franchisees and one of the big selling points is that they won't have to manage an internal network. The franchise company handles the whole vertical market app (such as dispatch software for service companies) including storing the data. I ask them: what happens if your internet access goes down? How are you going to find our where your techs are supposed to be? What about if the hosting company for the parent company goes down? Or, worst case scenario, you get in a conflict with the parent company and they don't release your data to you. You're out of business. Even if you had the data you don't have the app to read it. Trust me, this is being tried by a lot of franchise type companies and it's not going to be a happy ending for someone. The franchises aren't stupid, they know control of the data is control of the franchisee.

I think you are taking things to an extreme nobody even in the Middle Ages would have agreed with.

The points I make here are about control of your own data. This is an important point. If your internet connection goes down, that's bad. But if you lose your data permanently this is often something that can easily make a business go under, not to mention cause legal problems when filing for taxes, etc. If you control your data, you control your business. How you reach that data is secondary. If you are

And then you tell them what it will cost them for you to do all the form them and they quickly figure out that it's better to take the small chance that they get in a dispute with their franchiser and hope they can sue for damages if it does occur than to create an entire IT support system themselves. Simple math, centralized IT is cheaper.

Most users don't want control. They want to get on with what they want to do without having to configure everything themselves.

regardless of the software being open or not. I can see it being used for a business so that employees can take their work home with them

Nope, that's what VPN is for.

Cloud services are good because somebody else is taking care of the boring parts for you - like being on-call 24/7 to make sure your services stay running so that you don't have to. I'm considering moving our email to external hosting so that I don't have to worry about redundancy and reliability issues myself, and also because you get constant feature u

Most users don't want control. They want to get on with what they want to do without having to configure everything themselves.

I definitely agree with this, as much as 'control for the user' is touted as a benefit of open source the prevalence and success of devices that don't offer this proves that the user does not want control, all they want is for the device to do what it is supposed to do, they want someone else to take care of the management and configuration of it for them.

This might be like Android is OpenSource... i.e. it is OpenSource, and so are all the components, but from the user's point of view this make no difference at all you are still locked into a propitiatory sandbox...

Many Android devices are effectively locked down so that you can only use the interface provided, regardless if it is open-source or not... But at least with Android you have the device in your hand and so can always tunnel underneath the interface and get at the real system...

With Cloud based systems the interface is all you have access to and so what the actual system is written in what OS it is on are largely irrelevant...

Microsoft will most likely keep their business model that they have had for almost 40 years - in its very nature, their business model does not shift to new Ideas, but shifts the new Ideas into that model.

I'm sure I'm just really jaded now but I can't read a slashdot story anymore without looking for the anti-MS rhetoric. You think Microsoft sits around thinking about whether the cloud will force the adoption of open-source or closed-source software? Or do you think they're looking at what Amazon is doing and they've done the math. The cloud is about viewing computation as a commodity to be sold and bought. Why do open-source advocates have to make everything about open-source? Isn't the far more intere

We're getting better at this stuff and not re-inventing the wheel every time (MS is better at this than just about any other company IMHO

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Microsoft has basically reinvented the wheel - and for the most part, terribly - on just about all software they have ever produced. (Oracle is a strange comparison, mostly because they are now a services company, not a software company. What they end up doing with Java remains to be seen.)

errm...could it be because of MS's past history of tying everything in their ecosystem? Might that have something to do with it?

In other words, it isn't that open sourcers make everything about open source, it is more MS has made everything they touch about MS and the principle feature they use is closed source and its ancillary ill-effects. Care to explain why MS treats everything not MS as an enemy, how they posit their tools as this- or that-killers?

You think Microsoft sits around thinking about whether the cloud will force the adoption of open-source or closed-source software

Probably. Microsoft hate open source. Well, they hate any form of competition in fact, and basically just try to destroy anything that might try to oppose them. Try looking at some of the memos released during their anti-trust investigation, or witness Steve Ballmer desperate to "fucking kill Google" (good luck with that, Steve).

I'm not sure what you mean about MS not reinventing the wheel. They've been reinventing their user interfaces a lot recently. Often turning them into less usable messes (at least in

Without the GPL, a shameless company can base its own Operating System on the work of open-source contributors, lock it down, put a nice logo on it and sell it with its hardware, calling it "innovation" or "vision".

It is even easier if that same company is using generic hardware available to anyone, that way they don't even need to put a lot of work in drivers.

So what? The shameless company is sticking to the license. How is this wrong? I don't get this. The sources are still available and actively developed. The shameless company might employ some of those developers (it does) and contribute back to the community (it does).

I am a programmer who's employed to work on public domain software. My software is regularly used by academia and in commercial products. That people find it so useful is a good thing for me. That people can use my software to make mon

Without the GPL, a shameless company can base its own Operating System on the work of open-source contributors, lock it down, put a nice logo on it and sell it with its hardware, calling it "innovation" or "vision".

because that's where the developers building new cloud infrastructure are doing most of their work.

You do realize Microsoft and Apple have a lot of developers, and they can hire more. If they need more people to build cloud infrastructure, they will. Microsoft was able to build an entire OS without using Open Source Software. They can also build an entire Cloud Infrastructure without using Open Source Software.

It's even better than that. The "cloud" often puts the actual application on the cloud servers, right? All that is running at your end is a browser with a network API. So Microsoft can take GPL applications, hack them and repackage them any way they like, and put them on their own cloud servers without contributing back a damn thing, all while staying perfectly well within the GPL. In fact, the cloud gives MS the best of all possible worlds -- the ability to use GPL and other OSS software internally on

Go back and take a look at Miguel's technical description of Metro. App developers will code a mixture of XAML and a general purpose language such as C#, which will compile into bytecodes interpreted by the.NET CLR and bound to the new WinRT runtime (perhaps using the infamous P/Invoke), which Miguel says is layered on top of COM (a component technology leftover from the '90s which MS developed to compete with CORBA and DCE) on top of Windows kernel s

If you are in I-T, just fucking shut up about Apple. You just keep saying stupid fucking things. How is WebKit a love/hate relationship with open source? How is shipping the only name brand PC with open source software on it a love/hate relationship with open source? Fuck. So stupid.

Just for example, "failed to contribute patches back to the community" is a total fabrication. They didn't release their source until they shipped something based on it, which as far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong here), is perfectly ok by the terms of the GPL. They released a big chunk of code back initially (to be in compliance) and then set about making it much more streamlined and easier for other p

Err, because Apple historically has had a rocky relationship with open-source?

In fact, the WebKit example you try to cite is a classic example. Apple took KHTML, forked it, then failed to contribute patches back to the community. The KDE developers were famous for referring to the relationship as a "bitter failure":

www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1002

Way to spin that and leave significant details to make your point. Apple forked KHTML and forked it under the GPL. They released patches to WebKit but did not back port those patches to KHTML. I believe the point of forking something is that you want to go in a different direction than the original developers. Apple didn't do a very good job of documenting their changes but that's nothing new in software.

Then there was Apple's entire debacle with Darwin, and closing up the sources for that.

Again spin and leaving out details. Darwin is based on OPENSTEP which is under a BSD license. The

I don't see Sun as mismanaged. They did exactly as they intended to do. They just didn't care about money. They took from the Wall Street racket and pumped it into open technology. I think we have all benefited from this. I came to this realization when I saw the CEO getting grilled on PBS one day from all sides by Wall Street analysts. Sun was staffed by true technologists, people who loved doing what they did, research and development. Sun turned out some awesome technologies and funded their engineers' s

Try loading an Ipod with open audio formats if you want to see the hate side. Observe that tho open source offerings you cited were not actually origintated by apple, and that they guard their own code like rabid dogs.

General hint about life: usually, the problem is *not* that everyone *else* is stupid....

Once subscribed they will stay if the service is good quality, not caring what OS or version is running in the background.

Or will they stay because MS doesn't allow them to download all their documents or transfer them to another service (or allows them to be downloaded, but they're in proprietary formats that are useless for migration purposes anyway)?